I've looked at the Introductory Special Offer, but you still need to provide a credit card because when you go over your limits, you do have to pay. Man, I'm just a developer and I would like to try some things out with Azure Cloud. How can you evaluate a product if you can't try it out... Is there a way to get a sort of developer trial?
+1
A:
Q: How can you evaluate a product if you can't try it out
Welcome to the "cloud"
Use an open-source Platform-as-a-service setup. This way, you can test things on your own machines and migrate to a host if you like it. I dare say, using a freely available language (Python, Java) and running in something (GAE) that resembles a normal API is better. Hadoop might even be an alternative, and use something like Cloudera.
Aiden Bell
2010-02-08 14:59:35
+1
A:
If you have an MSDN subscription, it comes with 750 hours of Azure.
Jeff Hornby
2010-02-08 15:04:06
+1
A:
I totally agree with your point. However if you want to just play around with the SDK for development, you could always use the Development Fabric locally.
ronaldwidha
2010-02-12 07:32:42
+2
A:
MSDN Premium account holders get a special deal that provides quite a bit for free, and unless you try to launch a commercial site with it, I think you're going to have plenty of headroom:
- 3 1GB SQL Azure databases
- 7 GB in, 14 GB out monthly
- 750 hours (on a "small" compute instance)
- 1M access control transactions
- 5 service bus connections
- 10GB Azure storage + 1M storage transactions
I'd say that's pretty generous.
David Makogon
2010-02-12 22:28:23